I really loved Origins and the amazing world they came up with. I had so many questions to ask! What happened when the mages damaged the Fade and caused the blight? What was the history of Andraste's military campaign? What are the old gods of Tevinter like when not-a-demon? If they're real, is the maker real, and did he become a demon when the blight started in the Fade? Where did Flemeth come from and what is she trying to do (for that matter, what is she)? Where did Morrigan go? Is the Darkspawn Architect still out there?

And then the sequel was thirty hours of templars and mages making rude gestures at each other, plus political insight into the war on terror. It sounds like Inquisition is going to be a solid followup to 2, not 1. They have this actually imaginative and original setting and they just won't capitalize on it!

Between the firestorm over ME3's ending, the anger over DA2 (map reuse, dumbed-down potions, no gear changing on allies, every combat is waves of enemies, a plot that only makes structural sense after you finish the game, mostly,) and the falling swotr subscriptions, it really seems like Bioware's star is falling. I hope this game turns around while fearing it will finish off their damaged rep.

After DA2 and ME3 I can't say I have high hopes for the company anymore. Not to mention I bet Origin will be mandatory... So yeah gonna wait and see what people say about it before I even approach it with a mile long pole.

still need to finish Origins, and a good friend of mine actually really liked II soo idk he's a chill guy who likes a lotta stuff but still haha good stuff. hopefully III solves some of the weird design choices II seemed to have

Eh, this thread has enough bile to choke even the most heartless dictator ;d Too bad I have to add to it, because, really, do we expect anything grand and note-worthy from Bioware anymore? EA control them, even if they deny it with all their might we still see it.

It CAN be great, it CAN be a deconstruction of religious philosophies and oppression, it CAN have cavernous depth, but it won't be and we all know it ;d

rembrandtqeinstein:Meh, as far as I'm concerned between now and Project Eternity there aren't any RPGs going to be released.

Bioware has been absorbed into the EA borg. Look for tacked on multiplayer, consolized interface, and Origin exclusivity in this one. Wait let me add more....day 1 DLC, online pass codes, "optional" multiplayer that is actually gamechanging, more money spent on marketing than development, more money spent on executives and shareholders than development, pretty pictures but shallow forgettable gameplay, or linear railroad gameplay into scripted sequences that make for good looking trailers, lack of support for mods or player made content and player run servers, in game marketing....etc etc etc.

Bioware is dead.

Disagree, Mass Effect 1-3 was amazing, Dragon Age 1-2 are my favourite RPGs of all time. I suspect one again Bioware will make an astounding game only to be crucified by the community for a pick or two in the crust of an otherwise brilliant game.

While I won't say Dragon Age 2 was one of my favorite RPGs of all time, I will agree that despite the obvious flaws, it was still a damn good game. I'm in agreement that fans of Bioware seem to have two modes when regarding their games--"shining glory of success" and "complete failure worth none of our time". There's no middle ground. Dragon Age 2 wasn't what people were expecting or even wanted from a Dragon Age game, therefore it's shit to them. I know. I was one of them. Was it still a good game worth a $60 price? Hell yes, but they won't recognize that.

Dragon Age 2 is a good game. Mass Effect 3 is a good game. They have flaws the previous entries didn't. It's whether you allow those flaws ruin your experience because you want it to be something its not.

Oh, I can explain that: increased standards in light of increasing prices.

When you're now paying $60 per game, you expect a significant level of quality, and if it's not meeting that bar, then it's not surprising that someone would say the game is "crap". It's the same reason I never go see a movie for $10+ any more in the theaters unless I'm CERTAIN that the movie is worth that. Imagine paying $10 or more for three wasted hours. Sucks, doesn't it? A bad video game, in that sense, can be even worse because it might end up being roughly the same runtime (as some bad movie-licensed games can be beaten in a matter of hours) for 6 times that price.

People forget that we live in a terrible global economy and that there are hundreds, even thousands of games available to players through various locations in retail or digital distribution, including a rapidly growing indie market and another rapid expansion in mobile gaming. And many of those games are pretty darn good titles and significantly cheaper than AAA titles to boot. There's nothing wrong with telling AAA publishers that, because of these changing times, the bar has been raised accordingly, especially in light of many amazing AAA games that have come out recently. Customers SHOULD expect more from their retail AAA games, and publishers/developers should expect their customers to bash the game's flaws senseless.

Is it truly an awful game worthy of scorn every single time? Well no. But if it's not at a high level of quality, then those flaws SHOULD be highlighted and elevated so that other people can see these flaws and decide for themselves if the game is worth investing so much money in. And it's fairly obvious that mainstream video game review sites (including this one) will no longer do that for us.

Incidentally this is why I wince every time I see someone pointing to Skyrim or GW2 as "perfect games" by the fans or as "shitty games" by their critics. It's easy to come up with a laundry list of flaws in any of them, but they ARE great games despite said flaws. I own and love both. That said, anyone willing to reasonably point out a game's flaws and have a discourse about it....I'm fine with that. I'm even fine with people raging over a game's flaws, because generally that tends to get them fixed better than polite discourse. All the same, it's better if people understand that the main reason there's so much rage these days is because we end up paying more for (what they perceive as) less quality.

Hmmm... kinda wonder why this is being posted here. I mean, everyone here on The Escapist hated DA2, hates EA and hates Bioware so surely none of the sites visitors are going to buy the game. Oh, I know, it must be because EA bought the news story.

... yeah, anyway, I'm excited to see what they do with the game storyline wise. Diverting to Orlais now just as things are really heating up is an interesting choice.

Could we see some degree of an open world and timespan (without breaking Bioware's usual linearity and channelling the player around, too much)?DA devs did mention eyeing the latest Elder Scrolls title closely...

Sylveria:Fanboyism in its purest form:the games have widespread loathing and negative criticism, but they're really super special awesome and people are just knit-picking so they're opinions are wrong. No blind-faith praising of SWTOR while you're at it?

I just wonder what color explosions we'll get as endings this time.

I can admit that there are people out there who blindly praise games based upon nothing more than brandname if you can admit most people's perceptions of quality for recent Bioware games have been based on a binary spectrum with no middle ground.

For the record, TOR isn't the success Bioware hoped it would be, but I'm still baffled why some people have become straight up offended by its existence on the same level as Mass Effect 3.

Make it more Origins than DA2, Bioware. If you fuck this one up, you're pretty much fucked in terms of your fanbase abandoning you. This is your salvation, guys. So, give us all the best of the first one, regardless of how you feel about specifics. It's not about what you want, it's about us. Because, after all the balls you've dropped lately, you mess your act up anymore, and we'll just drop your show.

Copper Zen:I'm going to go against the grain and give BioWare the benefit of the doubt. I wouldn't be surprised if they have learned from their mistakes.

When Dragon Age III comes out we'll find out.

Judging by development time we can be reasonably sure at least we won't get another rushed debacle like its predecessor. Whether they actually manage to create something good in their alloted time remains to be seen.

It undoubtedly being on Origin means I won't buy it, but I'm certainly hoping it turns out to be a good game.

Ok, Bioware please get this right. DA:O is possibly my favourite game ever (I've completed it more times than I can count and am playing it again. I basically always ha a DA:O character on the go). I enjoyed DA2 despite it's faults and am going to play through it for the third time pretty soon (see, from innumerable replays down to 3). You made what is easily my favourite piece of Star Wars canon and then took it and made a mediocre MMORPG. Just don't Mass Effect the shit out of this please. Remember, people are watching you now. Everyone's already pissed. This is basically your last chance before you just become a has-been who can only survive on it's greatest hits (Baldur's Gate re-releases.)captcha: rainy days

Random Argument Man:What if the mage/templar fight will escalate and some magical "whatever' brings back the blight? That would make you happy?

I don't really care about the blight, but this is the third game ... by all rights things should start to get epic right about now. If there is a blight again it should only be a diversion, been there done that, the real story should be about the black city.

xedobubble:And then the sequel was thirty hours of templars and mages making rude gestures at each other, plus political insight into the war on terror. It sounds like Inquisition is going to be a solid followup to 2, not 1. They have this actually imaginative and original setting and they just won't capitalize on it!

Basically they have a problem with writers at the moment, it's not that they are bad at their craft ... but they're pretentious prats who lack direction from someone who understands fun triumphs over artistic integrity.

Most writers want to do street level crap, not epic supermen fundamentally changing the setting because that's so gauche. writers want dark unsatisfying endings, not uncompromising victory with maybe some heroic sacrifice thrown in because that's so video gamey. Most writers can not be relied upon to set the direction of a video game ... and yet at Bioware at the moment that's exactly what is happening.

IMO DA1 was still pretty much in the old mold of fantasy games, it was setting up for some epic showdowns and finally a voyage to the Black city to tackle the source of the Blight at the source AFAICS. Then the current set of writers took over.

Kargathia:Judging by development time we can be reasonably sure at least we won't get another rushed debacle like its predecessor. Whether they actually manage to create something good in their alloted time remains to be seen.

Pssst. Long dev time != a game that isn't rushed.

Some prominent examples: Duke Nukem Forever, Ultima 9, etc.

For all we know they've been twiddling their thumbs for two years, or even worse, they repeated the mistakes of Ultima and were forced to keep throwing out their original work and starting over for any number of reasons.

What I'd really like to know, though, is how they implemented multi-player functionality into the Dragon Age franchise. Because remember, EA is very proud of the fact that it refuses to green-light anything that doesn't have some form of multi-player functionality into it. Which means in order for DA3 to be green-lit, it must have multi-player in some format (either that or EA's executives blatantly lied to their customers AGAIN, which is possible too I suppose). So I wonder how they did it. Dragon Age 3 Facebook apps? Twitter feeds? Local co-op play? Or, god forbid, they ripped out its very soul and turned it into a F2PMMO like how it corrupted C&C? I can't wait to hear all the juicy details. :D

Copper Zen:I'm going to go against the grain and give BioWare the benefit of the doubt. I wouldn't be surprised if they have learned from their mistakes.

When Dragon Age III comes out we'll find out.

Judging by development time we can be reasonably sure at least we won't get another rushed debacle like its predecessor. Whether they actually manage to create something good in their alloted time remains to be seen.

It undoubtedly being on Origin means I won't buy it, but I'm certainly hoping it turns out to be a good game.

Maybe they'll bring it to Steam. I mean a lot of people were pissed off about ME3. If people who actually said they'd boycott it did(long shot I know) then maybe EA will realise that the first rule of business is to earn money and if people don't buy you're game then you don't earn money.

Mcoffey:Will it be a sequel to a good game, or will it be a sequel to Dragon Age 2? I fear the series is already too tainted to be saved. They should've just pulled a Highlander and forgot 2 ever happened.

If they forgot DA2, then they would be forgetting a good game. DA2 was 95% on the mark, the 5% I take off because of there only being six, maybe 7, dungeon setups. On all the other fronts of the game if they revert the game make-up back to what Origins was like, then they will be taking a major step in the wrong direction.

The three major of the major things they should keep from DA2 are, dialogue wheel(with voiced protagonist(unless there is biological reason in the story, there is no reason these days to have a mute protagonist in a story driven game where everybody else in the game talks to the main character), the combat system(Unlike Origins, DA2's system gave me absolute full control. I'll have none of this sit back for half the battle and twiddle my thumbs while waiting to only be able to control special abilities), and the leveling and ability system(DA2's leveling and ability system was the most rewarding, free, and fun system I've encountered in an RPG. It let me get and ability I wanted every level, getting an ability wasn't restricted by what points I had in stats, and I got more choices to customize my character's ability sets. Origins' system was rigid and locked down, I had to compromise my stats in key areas just so I could learn one ability I wanted.)

If they don't keep those things similar to DA2, then I'll have to watch the story through some youtuber's let's play instead of getting DA3, cause I can't suffer through Origins' hosed up system again(which is why I will most likely never beat Origins).

SmashLovesTitanQuest:Well, let me just say this: for the combat on the PC version, please give us either the same button mashing that will undoubtedly be present on the console versions of the game, or make the tactical combat fleshed out. None of this somewhere in between nonsense DA2 brought us.

So you are saying that you either want it to be full on no tactics, just press attack buttons, or you want it to be like Origins where combat is locked down, all tactical, and with little freedom to control your character as he moves like a snail through the thickest molasses.

I'll take the "somewhere in between nonsense" from DA2 any day. It succeeded in hitting the purest golden center that RPG combat should be at. It wasn't button mash at all, it was being able to have my character attack an a believable speed, not like Origins where it looked like my warrior was giving the enemies a friendly light pat on the shoulder every insanely long 3 to 4 second interval. Seriously, if the game's AI is in full control of the player's main/basic attack, there is something wrong with way the game is made.

While I had control over my main attack, I also had perfect control of being able to form tactical strategies with my special abilities. The ten guys dropping in randomly all around me from the rooftops and surrounding me on all sides thing that people constantly use as a complaint about the combat, it didn't ruin/remove any tactical advantages I had. All I had to do was pause combat for all of 2 or 3 seconds and deploy one of my strategies, and boom all enemies were dead in mere seconds.

StriderShinryu:Hmmm... kinda wonder why this is being posted here. I mean, everyone here on The Escapist hated DA2, hates EA and hates Bioware so surely none of the sites visitors are going to buy the game. Oh, I know, it must be because EA bought the news story.

... yeah, anyway, I'm excited to see what they do with the game storyline wise. Diverting to Orlais now just as things are really heating up is an interesting choice.

I'm proud to be not everyone. I was the opposite. I hated DA:Origins, and loved DA2.

On the story front, really with the game's world and the story from DA2, going to Orlais for DA3's story was the only logical course for the story to take.

Now, if these rumours about you maintaining are true; I'd like to post a rhetorical question.(And if they're not just imagine I'm talking about 'Assassin's Creed' or 'Fable' I guess.)

How come entertainment including management minigames are all the rage? I do not spend my leisure time daydreaming of the high-strung, adventures, and explosive lives of accountants and I don't much like doing middle management's work when I sit down to entertain myself. I do not want to handle any big organization, I do not even want to handle a pie shop. I'd handle the customer service of a library if it paid well or the game centerd itself around librarian work. But I do not want to tell my inquisitors\assassins\soldiers\peasants\villagers\monks\Buddhist crossdressers\stuffed toys\meaningless ones and zeroes\etc what to do and when to do it. I have hard enough a time managing two characters in Baldur's Gate and consider effectively utilizing 6 to be a feat I can be most impressed of. And you want me to control HUNDREDS and THOUSANDS of jackasses in a gameplay segment little more involving than rummaging through your underwear drawer and occasionally finding the stray bra? Please, games. I can't even play Starcraft! I never use the Helmet of the Dominator in Dota! My playstyle in 'Sins of a Solar Empire' can best be described as "turtling and huddling up with a blanket and cup of tea". Please, stop it. Just stop. If I have to look at another spreadsheet to look for the best supplier of sharp things to poke other people with and manually fine-tune and straighten the poses of my soldiers I think I'll go stab myself to death with the sharpened end of my keyboard I have furiously snapped in two as a bail-out function for my brain to not fall into a coma from intense boredom. Where's my simple character management and fighting game where your quest is something simple like rescuing a princess or killing a pesky mage? I like those games, this whole "saving the world" business brings all this grindy responsibility with it and I don't much care for that. So yes, 'Dragon Age: Inquisition', I know we never saw eye to eye and I loathed both your mainstream PC released instalments. But if you dial down the "boring" for either "story" or "fun" then I will forgive you.

Here's hoping there's an actual top-down camera in the PC version this time around, instead of some assclown port.

They can keep their flashy, AZN combat. Just give me waveless combat, where positioning and tactics actually matter (or have the blood mage be invincible again)and you can throw in all the particle effects and anime style fighting you want.

I do sincerely hope this is more Origins than Dragon Age II though. I absolutely love the original. But only time will tell.

That so much. It was so aggravating to have an easy fight because of positioning and tactics and then suddenly your mage gets raped by magically spawning enemies that show up right on top of them and your rogue is stunlocked because of lack of Fortitude.

CriticKitten:Oh, I can explain that: increased standards in light of increasing prices.

When you're now paying $60 per game, you expect a significant level of quality, and if it's not meeting that bar, then it's not surprising that someone would say the game is "crap". It's the same reason I never go see a movie for $10+ any more in the theaters unless I'm CERTAIN that the movie is worth that. Imagine paying $10 or more for three wasted hours. Sucks, doesn't it? A bad video game, in that sense, can be even worse because it might end up being roughly the same runtime (as some bad movie-licensed games can be beaten in a matter of hours) for 6 times that price.

People forget that we live in a terrible global economy and that there are hundreds, even thousands of games available to players through various locations in retail or digital distribution, including a rapidly growing indie market and another rapid expansion in mobile gaming. And many of those games are pretty darn good titles and significantly cheaper than AAA titles to boot. There's nothing wrong with telling AAA publishers that, because of these changing times, the bar has been raised accordingly, especially in light of many amazing AAA games that have come out recently. Customers SHOULD expect more from their retail AAA games, and publishers/developers should expect their customers to bash the game's flaws senseless.

Is it truly an awful game worthy of scorn every single time? Well no. But if it's not at a high level of quality, then those flaws SHOULD be highlighted and elevated so that other people can see these flaws and decide for themselves if the game is worth investing so much money in. And it's fairly obvious that mainstream video game review sites (including this one) will no longer do that for us.

Incidentally this is why I wince every time I see someone pointing to Skyrim or GW2 as "perfect games" by the fans or as "shitty games" by their critics. It's easy to come up with a laundry list of flaws in any of them, but they ARE great games despite said flaws. I own and love both. That said, anyone willing to reasonably point out a game's flaws and have a discourse about it....I'm fine with that. I'm even fine with people raging over a game's flaws, because generally that tends to get them fixed better than polite discourse. All the same, it's better if people understand that the main reason there's so much rage these days is because we end up paying more for (what they perceive as) less quality.

That's very true, I myself have a sort of standard when it comes to purchasing games (I only buy, at most, three games a year), and I would never blame anyone for deciding not to pay for a game they don't think they would like in spite of my differing opinion. Trust me, I understand why people have this binary spectrum of quality ingrained into their being. Really, what I'm saying with these posts is generally that I wish it was different and that people could take a step back to see the actual quality of a game as a whole. To see a game for the actual experience it offers and not for what you want it to be. Wishful thinking on an internet forum, I know.

Agree to disagree. I found pretty much every change they made to Origins in making DA2 a change for the worse.

The dialogue wheel is always bad, because it obfuscates what the character is actually saying. All you know is a three word, often misleading, summary and how much of an asshole Hawke/Shepard was going to be when they said it. If they have to keep that awful system in, I'd rather it be like Deus Ex: Human Revolutions, in that the short summary expands into what you're actually going to say when you highlight the option. And I liked Hawke less simply because he was voiced. His voice actor sounded unlikable regardless of inflection. Give me the Grey Warden any day.Just out of curiosity did you play DA2 on PC or console? Because combat on PC was god-awful. All I wound up doing was waiting for my cooldowns to finish because regular attacks were completely worthless. At least in Origins you had skills varied enough to cycle through them. It didn't help the art style and exploding enemies made combat so stupid looking as to take me out of the entire experience.As far as leveling goes, I like the linear progression of skills, it made it feel like my Warden was developing. Progression and whatnot, but that's a matter of preference.

loki789:I may be not the most informed gamer ever, but what is up with all the hate about EA/Bioware? I mean I enjoyed Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age Origin and 2 (enjoyed Origin more)

But to answer the thread cannot wait for the third just hope that I'll can be my favorite class, Elf arcane warrior or has some choice in race and companion's armor.

Most people believe that Bioware's games went downhill once they were acquired by EA. Now this isn't entirely true, ME2 and DA1 were published by EA but were in development before being bought so they got off easy, EA thought Bioware could get a big RPG sequel out quick so DA2 only had 18 months dev time compared to its predecessor's 4 years so ME3 is (from personal experience) alot more shooter-y than ME1 or ME2, now that's not a bad thing, but keep in mind all it did was piss off most demographics, shooter fans and CoD players EA were marketing to weren't going to sit through long cutscenes and sometimes up to an hour at a time without something to shoot, while die-hard RPG lovers that actually formed the fanbase in the first place were annoyed by the numerous lore-breaking, several 'important 'choices being retconned (Udina being councillor.... somehow, the Rachni Queen being spliced together even though I gassed the first one), that and basic things like unfinished plot threads and the terrible Map and Journal usage.Sorry for that, got into a bit of a rant there.

TL,DR version: Is it solely Bioware's fault for their recent dip in quality? maybe, but keep in mind EA has a track record of turning successful studios and running them into the ground in a short period of time since acquisition, and I won't go into that any further because there are others on the forum that could do it better and this isn't the topic for it.

The TL,DR is too long, TLDR: If this game is crap, it's probably down to EA's business decisions, which is what people hate about them.

Hopefully they'll bring back race selection, Baldur's Gate style perspective and make the battles interesting instead of just throwing a horde of weaklings and then another one from behind for each battle.

loki789:I may be not the most informed gamer ever, but what is up with all the hate about EA/Bioware? I mean I enjoyed Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age Origin and 2 (enjoyed Origin more)

But to answer the thread cannot wait for the third just hope that I'll can be my favorite class, Elf arcane warrior or has some choice in race and companion's armor.

It's mostly with EA being as greedy as possible with it's business practices. They foist their own client on you for every PC game they have, their servers are crap, they're homogenizing every game they're making from this day forth, a EULA that basically says if their services crap out you can't do anything about it, day 1 DLC, online passes every new release needs to access the whole game, releasing the same game every year(Madden, but that's my gripe) and destroying decent developers when the games they(EA) radically alter don't do well. There is a whole thing on it, hell this video will help explain:

With Wasteland 2, Project Eternity, Chaos Chronicles, Shadowrun and a few other real RPGs(and not action games that Bio makes) Bioware can close its doors for all I care.RPGs fans have some really great games to look forward to thanks to kickstarter. It finally looks like the RPG genre is exiting the dark ages of cinematic gameplay, emotionally engaging(tm) stories, cringe worth romances, immersion at the cost of gameplay and shallow gameplay altogether.

Also, LAAAAAAAAWL at people who actually think Dragon Age 2 was good. You need to either have extremely low standards or DA2 is your first game ever.

Well, they've been working on it for at least two years before even starting to think about turning on the hype machine, so it can't possibly be worse than DA2 (which in my opinion, was all right. Not great, but just about passable).

loki789:Thank you Josh12345 I was just curious ( do not worry that was not a rant it was a well in-formed writing)

I could have went in further about certain thing EA has done to get all the hate, but other forum users and Jim Sterling have at one time or another about why people hate EA, but I cut that bit out because it could have ignited a flame war, just in case that rant seemed a bit short.